


Love Me If You Dare

by gravity_shifters_couples_counseling



Series: A Clear Sense of Gravity [1]
Category: Gravity Rush
Genre: F/F, the angst is hindsight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 12:22:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13166829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gravity_shifters_couples_counseling/pseuds/gravity_shifters_couples_counseling
Summary: Before Raven can join the battle between Hekseville and Elektricitie, Bit must help her settle some questions she still has over herself, the world, and what she feels for Kat.





	Love Me If You Dare

Down where the wind whistled through cracks in the earth, where light was nothing but a distant memory, a home only the undesirable had known, I thought about her.

“Kat…” My voice, stolen by days or weeks or months of malnutrition and dehydration, forced itself out of my mouth.

She’d come for me. I’d known she would. I hadn’t entertained any doubts.

I’d played the scene over and over again in my mind, just a hopeful fantasy, but enough to keep me going through my coldest nights. Little details tended to change. Some days, the doors would fly off their hinges and Kat would fly straight past the spiral staircase, pushing her powers to the limit until she landed so hard she cratered  the ground, wreathed in her own righteous fury. Other days, the doors would creak open, slowly, and she would tiptoe down the steps three at a time, throwing herself at me in relief, her warmth lending me strength. On rare occasions, those doors slammed open, and she stomped down the stairs followed closely by a royal entourage who tripped over themselves to release me when she gave the command. In the end, it had all meant the same.

But the reality was all wrong. She’d taken those steps with uncertainty, wading through a mire of confusion, and when she’d looked at me, she’d seen a stranger. It was a moment that couldn’t have lasted longer than a few seconds, and yet I could feel it stretch on and on like a nightmare I couldn’t wake from -- like it was all I’d known.

Throughout my entire captivity, nothing had hurt as much as that look. I could suddenly feel how my stomach was trying to eat itself just to keep me going, how dry my mouth was, raw my throat felt, how my head raged with a splitting ache and yet felt dangerously light and empty. A thousand little aches pricked and prodded, panged and pounded at my body.

When she looked again, she saw me, my name spilling from her lips as if her mouth were overflowing with it. I smiled then. Or, at least, I’d tried. I’m not sure if the message went through.

She’d released me from my shackles with all the hurriedness and desperation I’d imagined for so long, set me down to rest on my back. She told me how they’d made her forget, lied to her for as long as I’d been stuck in that deep, dark dungeon, and I’d told her what I’d remembered, sat up and tried to say more but fell right back down. She’d caught me in those warm, gentle hands.

I’d faded in and out, senses coming and going to a land darker than the cave I lay in, but I remembered her telling me not to move, that she’d come back for me. And that she’d make those responsible pay. My eyes had opened to tiny slits, but I’d caught that fire behind her eyes, the kind I thought I’d only see in my dreams. I’d tried to smile again.

That was just a few minutes ago. The whole time I’d waited, I’d worried, dreaded. Something had made her forget again. Maybe it was that light that we’d first seen when we’d entered the castle. Maybe it came after. It didn’t matter. It could happen again. And if it did, I got the feeling I’d really lose her.

Something kept trying to drag me under into unconsciousness, but I fought back twice as hard as it pulled. I only needed long enough to regain my strength. Couldn’t risk passing out. She needed my help, or else the next time I woke up it’d be with her chained up right by my side. If that.

And then something in my head switched off. Just like that. One second there was a light behind my eyes, a voice in my head -- an unobtrusive running commentary  that I was just getting used to, told in a voice that warmed me when I was cold, comforted me when I should’ve been upset. And then there was darkness and silence.

The silence of our bond, our connection born out of something I still can’t explain, a sense so new and yet something I was already so dependant on.

My eyes shot open. I gathered myself, mentally, physically, started tapping into whatever energy I’d saved up, enough to struggle to an upright position, joints aching, muscles protesting every inch of the way. But I made it, and even when a wave of grogginess and nausea and ravenous hunger hit me all at once, I stayed up. Every breath came harder and more labored than the last.

I homed in on that next, forced myself to breathe slower, at odds with my pounding heart, until my head got some weight back to it and steadied. My eyes focused along with it, and for the first time in a long time, I took in the room around me clearly. It didn’t get any brighter or less foreboding.

I looked to the path ahead and felt every ache and burn in my body cry out louder, myself grimacing, at the sight of that long, winding staircase. Up until then, it’d just been a fixture in the scenery, as much as the stalagmites and stalactites that tore out of the ground and ceiling like the gnashing teeth of the World Pillar itself. But in that moment, it was an obstacle. A tall, grueling obstacle that’d be agony on my legs.

It wouldn’t stop me, though. If I had to crawl through it all, ground covered in broken glass, I would. Luckily, I wouldn’t have to because, despite some protest, my legs started working again.

My arms trembled as I pushed myself to my feet, feeling like I’d been doing nothing but push-ups for the last hour. It took me a moment to remember how to stand. I almost tripped more times than I’d ever admit.

Xii, who’d been pecking under his wings atop the metal scraps that had been his cage not too long ago, flew to me now that I was as close to ready as I could be.

Even though I could already guess the result, I tried to shift, but I only got a few inches off the floor before that nausea hit again and I had to ground myself, sickly paleness and green fighting to see which would color my face. No use. Not in that state. I was disoriented enough as it was, body not quite used to moving farther than the length of a chain. Falling around at terminal velocity wouldn’t do me any favors. I had to wake myself up.

I focused on those stairs again. In the absence of any sort of caffeine, they would have to do.

I took a step and stumbled one instant, recovered the next. Stopped just long enough to get my balance under control and started again. My legs were more like rubber than muscle and bone, unsteady, ungainly. Inconsistent.

But the hard part came when I stepped on those sloping stairs. Moving forward was pushing through an invisible current over a sheet of ice with weights tied on all around my legs. My heels dug deep but I dug deeper within myself to find the resolve, the drive, the sheer stubbornness to keep going even when the rubber melted in one sudden stroke of burning pain and I fell, my weak, battered cry the only sound in the cavern. Cold stone bit into my cheek.

I lay there, seeing red and black, but mostly red. Red pain. Red fury. They fed one another, aches fueling anger, anger pounding my temples until it became a motivating agony, back and forth, hand in hand. But I still couldn’t move. I had the will, but the way was missing.

Until I remembered Kat’s fire, a flame so intense it lit up a face as kind and gentle as hers with a quiet, stoking rage, burned down her doubts, drove her to fight something that could take her memories again. Just seeing it in my mind’s eye gave me the strength to push my head up, arms strong and steady. The chips of rock that had dug themselves into my cheek fell away.

I clawed at the floor, centuries-old stone giving way to fingers scratched red and raw but uncompromising, and focused. Focused on that fire. It was a furnace in my chest and I stuck my hand in.

Nerves ignited anew, melted the lead tethering my limbs until I was crawling and hauling myself forward by my arms alone. My strength came back tenfold, my body grew steadier, the furnace burned hotter. Grit teeth couldn’t filter out the determination from my voice. My vision narrowed until only the path ahead was clear, everything else a wavering haze. But the slope spiraled on and on and I needed more.

Instead of just my hand, I threw my whole body in.

I don’t know when I’d gotten up, just like I didn’t know it then, but I was running, faster than I ever had in my life, that wavering haze now a blur. Whatever rhythm of grunts and groans I’d had going was gone, replaced by a single cry, long and furious and carrying me all the way. The ground chipped away wherever my heels struck it, the rocky bits picked up by a stasis field summoned by my subconsciousness. My heart pounded, its beats building up something I couldn’t put words to -- something I could feel inside and around me.

The exit came up quick. My skin flushed a familiar blue. And then my cry climaxed and I threw my hand forward.

Gravity rushed all around me in a wave, tearing more rock -- entire chunks twice the size of my torso -- out of the ground and into the heavy, towering doors, turning the imposing wood to splinters wherever they hit. But then the wave itself crashed against them and they were swept away as easily as feathers in a storm.

The air boomed, a noise lost behind me in the deep, dark cavern but deafening in the narrow corridor those doors flew down, only stopping when they smashed against another set, left open, and ended their flight as one big pile of matchwood.

The sound of my breath came back first, hard but somewhat satisfied, like after a long run. Then my mind was properly processing the image in front of me and I couldn’t help but smirk a little. Those doors had been my bane for the longest time, and now there they were, strewn all over the floor, only fit for kindling. The only way this could’ve been better was if the person responsible for my extended stay in this place, whoever that was, was somewhere deep underneath that pile.

I brushed those thoughts aside and listened to the silence that had returned to the castle, waiting for something to interrupt it. But nothing ever did. And nobody was coming down to investigate. Everyone was gone.

Kat was gone.

I moved down the corridor quickly. The clacking of my heels didn’t matter. Still, I kept my Blue Jays within easy summoning reach.

Even as I tried to give my mission my total focus, my mind wandered the farther I got from the dungeon, where with every step the air got clearer, cleaner, now that it wasn’t stuffed into some old cave. For a long time, that atmosphere had been everything I’d known. Fresh air -- not something breathed in, out, and then in again, over and over until I could taste myself in the air -- was something I’d have to get used to. It was a subconscious thing to think -- a distraction I couldn’t afford.

Xii reached the doorway before I did and disappeared into the greater hall beyond. I was there seconds later.

I recognized the hallway as the place we’d first arrived in, and to my right was, if I was remembering right, the entrance we’d taken. Maybe the only entrance. The memory of how we’d gone down that marble floor side by side, taken the stairs up, and pushed past heavy doors  reaching far over my head flowed back into my thoughts. It was a sequence I’d kept preserved, pristine and picture-perfect as the actual event. A rock to keep me steady when my imagination wouldn’t do. I pressed on, in the direction of the throne room.

It was all I could do, without that voice to lead me.

Kat’s fire had done its job: my strength was back in full now. The pains I’d gained every moment I’d spent locked away had burned down so fast it was like they’d never been there at all, unimaginable despair gone in a hot flash. As long as we had each other’s backs, as long as we were together, let them try to push us down. There would always be one of us left standing to help the other back up.

The fire, dying down, no longer a source of strength, was a spark I kept stoking in my heart.

It wasn’t until I was taking the stairs that the silence started pressing in all around me, a very real weight that slowed my steady gait to a crawl. There weren’t any forces at work; just my own hesitation. Fear. Not for myself but what I’d find when I opened the doors.

Fights were noisy. Their conclusions weren’t.

I reached the top step and took a deep breath, partly to reign myself in and partly to ward off the silence. Then I looked inwards, and the spark became a comfort I cradled, hard as I could without snuffing it out. As long as that was still lit, I could believe Kat was okay.

With that in mind, I put my hands up against the doors and pushed.

They moved smoothly on well-oiled hinges, so much so that even the relatively little effort I’d used sent them almost flying open. My gravity was summoned up and ready before they stopped moving.

I dropped it just as fast, because the scene sprawled all over the throne room told me I wouldn’t need it.

Of all the things I could’ve imagined were behind those doors, Alias the Hekseville Phantom should’ve been higher on the list. That helmet was unmistakable. It took me a moment to overcome the confusion and realize that it wasn’t attached to his neck. Even longer to see that there was no blood. Just sparks and circuits.

He was some sort of machine. My mind couldn’t help but spin up new questions to wonder at.

Had he always been a machine?

Had this just been an ambush -- a fight he’d lost and she’d won? It would make sense. Nothing good had come from our visit and he’d always been a villain, so why start helping her now? But how had he even known about this place, so high up the World Pillar nobody knew it existed?

Maybe it wasn’t even the real Alias. Maybe Alias had been human and this was some sort of robot replicant. But if that were true...

Why?

Why him?

Why was he here?

Too many questions, too many at once. I wasn’t used to staying and dealing with my thoughts. I had to move, but I couldn’t. Not until I found a clue to send me Kat’s way. As if desperate to sever that line of thinking, my eyes raced around for something else to focus on. They settled on an unconscious man.

“Unconscious” was maybe too hopeful a word. His chest wasn’t rising or falling, and in this kind of silence it would’ve been easy to hear his breathing. The fact that I didn’t told me all I needed to know.

His bearded face tugged at my memory. It must’ve been one of the royals who’d greeted us, just before that white light, but I couldn’t even be sure of that. That was a memory I’d let fall into neglect. But the fact that I even somewhat recognized him must’ve counted for something, because other than the occasional guard that had come down to the dungeon to tend to me, I hadn’t gotten the chance to see many faces.

With that thought came rage, sudden and violent and silent inside me. Maybe it was irrational to think he’d had something to do with Kat’s kidnapping, the amnesia, but I didn’t really care. This whole place was rotten.

With that thought, it was hard to feel bad for him.

My features twisted from confusion to anger and back again. Those feelings built up, filled up my mind until they were pushing each other against every corner of my head and pressing a painful pressure against my temples. My features met somewhere in the middle.

“What happened!?” They were words that had to be said, to let out some of that pressure and to fill the silence with something before it could squeeze me again.

I hadn’t actually expected a response.

“Long time no see, Raven.” The voice was young and monotone.

I whirled around, but my thoughts were tangled and the Blue Jays I’d meant to summon only fizzled and failed.

He looked like he sounded: stoic as stone, like a statue of a boy. Streaks, neon-bright orange, crossed his dusky skin, and over it draped a robe, color a perfect match for his body. His pale face had one yellow eye too many, running vertically down his forehead. He sat on some sort of ball big enough he could curl up inside, colored a paler orange than his lines, and it in turn floated off the ground. And the helmet he wore topped it all off, bulbous at its base and running up until it narrowed almost a foot over his head.

Something about him…

Something about him struck at my memory. Beyond all the strangeness, something bubbled to the surface of my murky mind: a face like his, just as boyish, just as stoic.

A normal boy in Hekseville.

“You…?” I said, without realizing I was speaking until the sound made it to my ears, without really knowing what I meant by it. But I’d lost my telepathic tether to Kat, and there was no trail to follow. That tiny bit of familiarity was as good as a map, somewhere to start. Hopefully.

“You and the other are one being,” he continued, “split by fate, forced to be two. While this unnatural state has caused many unforeseen difficulties … At the moment, it could be an unforeseen blessing.”

He didn’t seem to have any idea of just how sudden and out-there the things he’d just said were, so out there I’d already put up my walls so that whatever other nonsense he decided to spit out couldn’t get in my head.

They had my mouth dropping, his words and the way he delivered them, just a little before I caught it and slammed it back shut hard enough something cracked. Thinking he could give me a lead was one thing, but what he was saying…

I would’ve laughed if lives weren’t at stake! Kat and I were supposed to be one? “Fate” messed with us and now we are who we are? How could he expect me to believe all that from someone I only had a foggy image of somewhere deep in my head? Someone who’d just showed up and started stringing together long lines of words that meant nothing? And who was he to know these things? For all I knew, he could be some trickster from the past, preying on the gap in my memory to play me now that I didn’t remember him!

For all I knew, he was the one who’d stuck me down there and messed with Kat’s head…

My lips peeled back so he could see my snarl. “Who are you?” I said in a way that turned the question into a threat.

He didn’t even flinch. Instead, he raised his hands, fingers L-shaped so that when he put them together, they were imitating a camera’s lens. “You know me. Sachya, remember.”

My first instinct was to disregard that. There was more I wanted to say, with the kind of words I probably wouldn’t have considered if Kat were around, but then something invisible, intangible to all but my mind, rolled over me, left me slack-jawed, empty-eyed. Not nausea. Disorienting all the same.

It was a pressure behind a valve that turned and turned until that pressure released and became a wave of sights, of sounds, of smells and tastes and touches. Of _experiences_.  But I wasn’t seeing them through my own eyes. I couldn’t be. They were so far back and alien and I didn’t remember any of it; not the years of scrounging in Hekseville’s trash for scraps, or the ruined city all the way down at the bottom of the World Pillar, or the little girl with the black, shaggy hair that stared back at me when I looked in the mirror. Not even the first time I’d met Xii. As long as I could remember, he’d been by my side…

I’d never thought about it before, but then, in that moment, it was impossible not to: I didn’t have a single memory from my childhood.

Faster than despair, the answer came, taking on the form of a young boy, his hair also a dark mess, standing high over his head. His eyes were soft, kind for the longest time. Then they turned hard, and something sharp found my heart.

His name came easily -- _Zaza_ \-- a boy I’d only met once, with his sister Sachya. So why had I cried then? Why did it feel like I’d known him all my life…?

Because I had.

The blanks were starting to fill, and even where memories already existed, new ones sidled up alongside them, but instead of my mind twisting itself in loops trying to make sense of it all, they sat comfortably by each other. I didn’t look at those unfamiliar memories like a passive observer anymore. Now I could feel them properly, aches that had healed long ago back and gone as soon as I’d blinked, just to mark my body and let me know they’d been real, once upon a time; old joys and older grief didn’t last much longer.

I’d been that little girl with the black, shaggy hair, Sachya, a long time ago. A time that didn’t really exist anymore; a time spent with Zaza, clinging to his sleeves, sleeves that he’d use on my tears, that always hung a little low so they’d scratch against my hair when he’d put a hand on my head before the tears could even come. Hands that pushed me when there was a fear I had to overcome, held me when I wasn’t ready to do so. Hands that could be warm when the days were cold, or rough when bullies were colder.

My first memory of him was his smile. If only his smile could’ve been the last I’d seen of him, too.

Orphaned twice. Saved once.

No, that wasn’t true. I’d been saved a second time -- by Xii, who’d shown up just when I needed him most. And with him came a new sense of reassurement in my life, after I’d lost the only one I’d ever known. A voice…

But that was as far as that train of thought went, consciousness derailed and plucked from my thoughts, flung somewhere far, far from Zaza and the children and the bus and Boutoume and the ark and--

Hekseville. I was back in Hekseville.

Except, not really. I was just a pair of eyes and ears, connected to nothing, smelling, feeling, tasting nothing, only good for hearing and seeing, and seeing and hearing only what I was shown.

The rebels --- Yuri rushing them to their stations.

Something that looked like a woman. Elektricitie. The name came to me like it had always been in my head. Nevi as white as the air up in this place. Her laugh sounding like everything wrong with the world.

Banga. Lisa standing her ground even as Gawan tripped over himself running inside. She said something about “the fire of the gods.”

Yunica flying at the head of the pack.

Anemones, copies of that war machine we thought we’d seen the last of, took to the sky at the push of a button. Their cannons aimed in the right direction this time, at least.

And then I was seeing a pale light filter in through stained windows that made me feel small and hearing the emptiness in the air trapped in the walls and smelling the oil and burning wire of Alias’s remains and tasting it too on the tip of my tongue and feeling the bite of the coldest cold I’d ever tried to ignore.

I blinked. I was back in the throne room. The boy was still there.

No. _Bit_ was still there.

My mouth was the first thing to start working again. “It’s you!”

It was a stupid thing to say, after all the new things I had to say now, with an entire second life’s worth of memories. But I said it anyway because even the most meaningful words I knew were too weightless to carry the sentiment I wanted them to -- a sentiment I was still wrestling to figure out myself in the middle of the storm in my head, whipping away the words I was just starting to string together and presenting me with something old and forgotten to string more words onto in the vain hope that they’d be enough to weigh it down long enough for me to get a good look.

He just closed his eyes for a second and nodded once, opened his eyes again, and went on as if the memories he’d just restored had been a distraction -- something to move on from. I guess they were. Memories are just pieces of the past, after all. What he was concerned with was the present, and the future. In that way, we were alike. For the most part.

In that moment, I had to force myself to look away from what had been and look on to what would be.

“Everything has led to this moment,” Bit said. “The king has unleashed Elektricite upon Hekseville. If something is in the king’s way, Elektricite has more than enough power to get rid of it.” Even these words he said without any commitment to one emotion or another.

It struck me that I knew just what exactly he was. “You’re one of them. Like Gade and Cyanea.”

“Think of me as a servant, fulfilling my duty by helping correct the issues that occur in this world.”

A long time ago, or maybe not so long, I’d said the same thing in almost the same words, and so had he. History has a funny way of repeating itself like that, and it set my teeth on edge, because the first time around hadn’t ended so happily. I’d been left holding every pound of that pain but without the memory to know why I was holding any of it in the first place. Every day I’d carried it, dragged it with me through the streets, swung it into some bad guy’s face as hard as I could, weighing me down when I tried to fly away and leave it far behind. Closure always out of reach but, somehow, just close enough I kept reaching for it, until one day I gave up.

And eventually, sorrow faded away like a bad memory.

This time would be different. I’d make sure of it, starting with that very moment. “Where’s Kat?”

“She has to deal with consequences set in motion a century ago,” he said as if he’d read my mind and had the answer prepared.

She was recovering her own memories too, then? Good. We could go through this together, help keep the other on her feet through the storm. But until then…

I turned around and stared down the path that lay ahead. “Then it’s up to me to buy her time.”

As I ran out of the throne room, Bit’s words found their way to me. “Until Alua … Kat remembers who she truly is, you’ll be all that stands between the world and Elektricitie.”

No pressure, then.

-

I couldn’t have been more than two steps out of the palace before the bitter cold reeled my mind back to a bitter place -- back to the part of me I’d only just gotten back. It had a lot to say. And even if all I wanted to do was shout it down and commit myself to what was in front of me, I knew that wouldn’t be possible anymore. You don’t open those kinds of floodgates and expect to not get swept away in the waves that follow.

Holes in my memory, holes that I’d never really realized were there unless someone let something slip that forced me to really look at them, were full now, and everything I hadn’t known hadn’t made sense, made sense now that I knew they hadn’t.

I thought of Zaza and our parents. The children and Boutoume. D’nelica and the deal we’d struck. How I’d gone from a faceless, dirty orphan picking trash for food and sleeping in the gutter to someone who struck fear in the hearts of Hekseville’s citizenry.

How I tried to kill Kat.

What surprised me as much as it didn’t was just how much that last image made me feel, and how little the rest did. The picture was a phantom pain in the back of my skull, coming back to haunt me again, show me how I’d hurt someone I’d come to care about. But the collage that made up my childhood could only manage a pinprick on my arm. It didn’t take much thinking to figure out why.

I’d moved on a long time ago, ignorance turning to closure, and just because I now had names and faces to put on those wounds, just because I’d learned the question that I’d been searching for answers for, didn’t change anything. Zaza was gone. The children were gone. Even now that I’d regained the part of me that had been Sachya, she was gone, too. And even if I hadn’t known any of that at the time, I’d _felt_ it. All too well. The closure was just as real.

But Raven was still here. And Raven had new people to protect, starting with the one person she hadn’t known she’d known most of her life. The one person who made her whole.

But thinking about it like that brought up fresh pain, so I shoved it as far back into whatever crammed corner of my head I could manage. I’d deal with that closet’s worth of implications later.

With that thought in mind, I took to the sky, my eyes on the ground, in search of the edge of the World Pillar from which I could start dropping down. I vaguely remembered the way there, but I figured it couldn’t be much more complicated than shifting forward and keeping on that route, so that’s exactly what I did.

I pushed myself until my skin burned blue, the same gravity field throwing me forward also whipping away the snow before it could touch me. It went a long way to keep me warm. As warm as I could be.

The sky here was a blank, disarming thing, like a white veil hiding something malevolent behind its silky perfection. Thinking back to my first moments here, there really was no better way to describe the whole place.

I almost slowed down, worried I’d fly right into a pack of wild Nevi, or the side of one of the many, smaller pillars that made up people’s homes, but the view Bit had burned into my brain -- of Hekseville under siege -- overrode that niggling feeling of self-preservation.

Xii cawed by my head, a familiar warning cry, and I narrowed my eyes against the cloudlike horizon. It was about as easy as finding droplets of milk against white tile from a few meters away, but closing the distance revealed the outlines of shapes; twisting, writhing, undulating shapes. Nevi, of course. I pulled in my gravity, balled it up until it split and took physical shapes, as blue as the rest of me, and then released, letting them orbit around as Blue Jays.

Their eyes came in clearer, a whole school of them, bulbous and red and looking at anything but me, and that was when I knew I was within range, when I could see them down to the beady pupil. I picked out six of them, the six I was surest to get, and cut my Blue Jays loose from my personal gravitational field, reorienting their own gravity forward.

They were whispery things, falling at terminal velocity, blue blurs lighting up the sky with something other than white and hitting nothing as their targets swirled in on themselves under black, smoky clouds, their pale mass peeling away into nothing, leaving behind nothing, as they blinked out of existence. My Jays sailed on and on, eventually either fizzling out or disappearing from view somewhere deep in the thickness of the air.

They were moving down to Hekseville! They had to be, to add to the invading force down there. I had to hurry. If I was remembering the Nevi numbers I’d seen on arrival right, Hekseville’s defenders would need every able body to stave them off.

I pushed my power to higher highs, sacrificing maneuverability for speed, turning tighter corners than I was used to as they rushed up to meet me. The Nevi I passed were nothing more than smudges at the edges of my vision that when I turned around to catch again were long gone, the tiniest black particles the only clues they’d ever been there at all.

My heart hammered in its home until it felt like it were inching out of my throat with every beat, nerves fraying thin, and trying to turn my thoughts from Hekseville to something else, to keep myself steady, focused, only took them to a subject I would do anything to avoid.

_“You and the other are one being, split by fate, forced to be two.”_

Those words haunted me. They cast a whole new light on our relationship -- a dim, harsh one that left me scrambling for answers in its shadow, and I got the feeling I wouldn’t like what I found. If I ever found anything.

I kept telling myself that it didn't change anything, that we were who we were and I felt how I felt and fate had nothing to do with it, but…

Everything that had led me to her, her to me, had been made up of little coincidences. Introduce “fate,” that damn four-letter word, and those “coincidences” don’t seem so unintentional anymore. What was stopping an emotion or two from being just another little program or script in the Creators’ world, uploaded to my brain to keep things going the way they were supposed to?

No. Thinking about this wouldn’t help me any. It wouldn’t help Kat or Hekseville or Banga and Jirga Para Lhao. But speed and a battle-ready mindset would.

I shook myself back to reality just in time to see that I’d made it, a hole in the clouds from where clear, unfiltered sunlight shone through in a pillar marking my exit. It spun and swirled like it were alive and hungry, waiting for me to take the plunge and appease it. I stopped right over and gave myself a moment to catch my breath.

I turned to Xii. “Let’s go.”

He cawed his agreement.

Then I turned off my shifting and let normal gravity take me again.

It dragged me down, down, down, the light shining brighter, the hole getting wider, the swirling more insistent the closer I got. The wind whistled at my ears. My jaw set, eyes narrowing to a razor-sharpness. Whatever this Elektricitie was, I’d take her on for as long as I had to, and then, when Kat arrived, we’d finish her. Together. Just like we always did. That was a promise, to the people and to--

“Bit?!” I shouted as I shifted back and stopped an inch away from a collision with the Creator.

He’d just appeared out of nowhere. I’d blinked, and in that time he was suddenly there, his back to the ground and face to me, as if gravity didn’t have a hold on him either. He hadn’t even flinched.

“There’s something bothering you,” he said, which was probably supposed to be explanation enough.

I recovered quickly, my gaping mouth closing into a snarl. “Get out of my way.”

“You can’t fight with your mind so preoccupied. We need to empty it out before you can face Elektricite.”

My temple flared and so did my tone. “There’s no time. You’re the one who said so!”

He didn’t budge an inch, or spare an inch in body language. “Raven, you know how the World Pillar works. Time passes slower the lower it goes. We have time enough.” He stopped, let the words hang for emphasis, and continued: “What you’re about to face will be your greatest challenge yet. You’ll need every advantage you can get -- or, at least, as little disadvantages as you can afford.”

As a Creator, I knew to take his word for it when he said that, but when emotion meets logic, emotion tends to win out. Simply put, I didn’t _want_ to talk about what was on my mind. I’d worked with Bit before; I knew he didn’t have all the answers. But he had enough. And the idea that he might have this one in particular terrified me.

Would brute strength get me through him? Maybe. But whatever struggle broke out would only leave me that much weaker for the fight farther below.

Maybe evading him would work. Then again, it most likely wouldn’t. He’d just popped up out of thin air, hadn’t he?

Words could do the trick. The right ones, strung together, should--

No, they wouldn’t. Creators were stubborn. Maybe not as much as me or Kat, but stubborn enough.

He’d only persist in any way he could, so, slouching my shoulders, I played along. “Fine, then, if you really feel like it’ll help. I need you to tell me something. I want to know what…” I mulled over for something inconsequential to ask. “... I want to know what my memories mean. Which events happened, and which got erased? What _matters_?”

He said nothing for a few seconds, no doubt computing the right words, and then answered as if what he were saying was simple enough without elaborating. “Nothing got erased, and everything matters.”

My temper took a turn for the worse. Something hot and red flared behind my eyes. I’d give him one thing: he knew how to give the kind of non-answer that left me wanting the real thing. Now I had to know what he was getting at. “What does that mean? You said--!”

“In the conventional sense,” he continued, “we erased a lot of your past. But nothing that’s lost is really lost. It’s simply in an in-between of here and there, waiting to either be reclaimed or … not. That’s where Kat is, recovering her lost memories, and that’s where your own memories were waiting. The Brink.”

That was better. More concrete. But still, he had to have more. The glaring red wasn’t satisfied. I made a point of looking expectant.

He went on. “Your ‘erased’ history existed outside of memory for the longest time. If you want to keep thinking in computer terms, look at it as an edited copy of a file, saved under a slightly different name but running simultaneously along the other. If you would rather see it as a dream and the mind, think of it as a cognitive dissonance of the world: two conflicting ideas, or histories, existing in the same space, at the same time, but suppressing one in the minds of everyone so that the other wins out and becomes history.”

That answer had me gritting my teeth. Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered.

Creators. Why did everything they said and did have to be so convoluted? “What you’re saying is that … that everything I remember, _everything_ , even the things that contradict each other…”

Bit nodded once. “Happened.”

My eyes turned up and found his. “How?”

“Like a dream, or computer code, the rules of this world are as rigid as they are flexible. This flexibility is what’s allowed us to meddle as much as we have. But there _are_ rules, rules that we must follow. Humans can’t break them often. You don’t have the power. Usually. But the gods...” He trailed off. “When talking about these things, it’s easier to relate them to concepts that’re universally understood, at least on a surface level, like dreams and system bugs. But it isn’t so simple, and it’s not literal. If this world were really a dream in the way you understand dreams, it would fade with Cyanea and her Dream Guardian. But it won’t. This world will outlast them -- all of us Creators.”

He carried those words with a finality that made me more than a little curious. “What do you mean?”

“Elektricite isn’t the end -- she’s a _means_ to The End. An unwitting harbinger of something worse: a dark ocean to drown the world and return it all to nothing. Its coming is as natural as the sun, rising and falling every day. Except this ocean never falls. It’s fate, and an inevitability. To stop them both means breaking many rules to make the impossible possible, and breaking those rules leads us to…” For the first time, he seemed to really have to strain to find the right words. “...fade away.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Creators weren’t invincible. Far from it. But I never thought there’d come a day when they might just disappear. “You’ll die?”

“Again, not in the way you would traditionally think of it. But I also wouldn’t know all the details. I’ve never tried it before, after all.”

I smirked, but it was bitter and gone as fast as it had arrived. So he had a sense of humor after all.

At the moment, I didn’t. His news had my thoughts conflicting, colliding, tailspinning away only to hit the edges of my mind and bounce back into each other. I’d taken my connection with the Creators for granted. Just a minute ago I was even trying to find a way to cut this conversation short because I thought that any answer he had I might not want to hear, but even then I’d had had the luxury of thinking I’d have him or Cyanea or Gade to turn to if I ever decided I wanted a definitive answer later on. Now I knew better. If I wanted to know the only true answer to the question I was too afraid to ask, now was the time, before it was too late.

Funny. I’d never liked the business that usually cropped up whenever a Creator got involved, but now, when faced with their imminent … death, if it was that, I couldn’t say I wouldn’t miss having them around.

I put up my best poker face even as every voice of reason and screeching emotion in my head debated and argued and tore each other down. I didn’t want him to see what I felt and take my choice away by giving me an answer.

“You still seem troubled,” Bit said.

“I’m just … trying to wrap my head around it all.” I winced at how unconvincing my words came out.

 _Okay, now tell him you’re fine and get going_.

_No. Ask him. If you don’t, you’ll live with that doubt for the rest of your life._

Bit’s voice cut through the word cloud smogging up the inside of my head. “Is there anything else you need to know?”

I didn’t answer immediately.

_Hekseville needs you right now! You’re wasting time!_

_This isn’t a question you can’t afford to not know the answer to._

_But what if the answer’s worse than what you don’t want to hear? What if it’s everything you’ve feared?_

_That fear will be nothing compared to the--_

_Shut up! Stop talking and go!_

“No…” Whether that was meant for myself or for Bit, I didn’t know.

But Bit didn’t know that. “Hmm. If you think you’re really ready, then I’ve done all I can. The rest is up to you.” He raised his hand, three fingers held up, maybe his idea of waving goodbye.

_No, stop him! You’re running out of time!_

_Yes, you are, which is why you need to hurry up and get down to Hekseville! They need you!_

_Yes, they do need you, but you need this! You’re always rushing because you’re scared you’ll fail again if you don’t, but you have time now and you know it!_

_N-No, there isn’t!_

The air around Bit suddenly got hazy, his image distorting like rippling water.

_But you’d rather tell yourself that you don’t to keep yourself from just staying and saying what you need to say!_

_I..._

And like a rock sinking into a deep pit of water, his form got darker, harder to make out.

_What’s wrong with you?! Just say it!_

_No--!_

_Say it!_

_I can’t…!_

Say it!

“Wait!” My hand shout out as if I could stop him with just that.

The distortion over and around Bit ended instantly, and it was as if he’d never made to leave, color back in a blink. The blank slate of his face somehow managed to express curiosity without doing much at all.

My poker face had started showing its cracks but now it was shattered, the full extent of my apprehension on full display.

In that moment, I did something I hadn’t done since I’d been little Sachya, a nervous tic that’d been lost to me my whole life: I took my hair, and I tugged on it. Over and over again, one hand taking over for the other when it reached the end.

Bit said nothing. I wished he would.

My hands were shaking. I focused on that, trying to ground myself even there, thousands upon thousands of miles off any ground, closing my eyes and forcing my breathing back to something more manageable. When that happened, when my fingers stilled, I took them out of my hair, balled them up, and faced Bit with all the conviction I could. Enough to force my voice steady and iron-hard. “There’s one thing I need to know, more than anything else.”

He didn’t even blink. He’d probably been expecting it. “Ask, then.”

This time, it only took me a second to steady myself. I reached inside, found the words, and pushed them all the way to the tip of my tongue, where there was nowhere to go but out. “I need to know what we are. Me. Kat. You said that we’re unnatural, meant to be one, split in two. We’re still meant to be together, that much is obvious, but are these feelings just the universe trying to fix itself, like you do? Are they to make sure I stay with her? Are they really mine?!” My words were ramping up and I couldn’t control them. When things got this way, I never could. Something wet and warm went down my cheeks and my vision blurred and my voice broke as it shot up loud enough that even the whole of Hekseville must’ve heard me when I shouted, _“Do I really love her?!”_

The words hung heavy. Bit didn’t seem especially eager to pick them up.

But, eventually, he did. “Fate isn’t a set path; it’s an ever-changing road whose horizon we, as Creators, can see ahead of time. If fate were set in stone, you two wouldn’t be two.”

Tears. Tears were falling down my face. Why had that taken me so long to realize? I wiped at them. They soaked. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that the universe is as flexible as it is rigid. You two were always connected by that thin thread of what you were meant to be, and your similarities aren’t coincidences, but you’re still very much your own people. Tell me, even with that little voice in the back of your head telling you that there was something special about her, what was the first thing you did when you met?”

I thought, but not too hard. “I brushed her off.”

“And the second?”

I didn’t have to think that time. Didn’t want to answer, either.

“What I’m trying to say is that for all your similarities, you’re still two very different people. There’s no meddling there; just little left-overs of what wasn’t meant to be. You’re right in that fate led you to each other, but it had no say in what you’d do once you met. And even then, fate has been changed more times than you’d believe, by human actions no less. It’s definitely not the first time love has changed hers.” He stopped; reoriented the conversation. “You didn’t have to develop the feelings you did, and yet you did. That was all you. And her.”

I took a second to absorb it all, then I closed my eyes, let the totality of what he’d said linger in my mind, and, when it tried to leave, took it and hugged it tight in my chest. It was warm, and that warmth spread through me, to every corner of my body, to every nerve that needed it. It was the sweetest taste on my tongue, the most soothing sound I’d ever heard, the second-most beautiful sight I’d ever seen. It was everything I needed and more.

The tears stopped. My frustration didn’t fizzle out -- it was snuffed out in an instant. The only thing left to replace it was an all-pervading peace. Even if Elektricite and her invasion were just around the corner, I couldn’t help the feeling that, for once, everything was going to be alright. No catch. Free of charge.

“There’s a myth among you humans,” Bit went on, “about love. It says that you were all born as two souls in one body, but you were cursed to be split at birth and sent to separate corners of the world. Whether that corner is close or far is up to luck. Most people spend their whole lives wandering the world in hopes of finding their ‘other half,’ as you’ve taken to calling them. Even less ever find them. But you two, you get to live the rest of your lives with the knowledge that it was always meant to be.”

I chuckled, giving my eyes one last sweep with my sleeve. “Is that myth any true?”

“For you, it is. But for everyone else?” He made a vague waving motion with his hand. “Who can say?”

I didn’t realize I had a smile on my face until it was almost touching my ears. “Thank you, Bit.”

“I only hope I’ve done enough.” He made the three-finger sign, and he started rippling again. “Raven, this is goodbye. After this is over, you won’t have to worry about fate anymore; we won’t be around to bend it or keep it straight. But you and your other half will still be at the forefront. You can protect this world and its people.” And then, because he couldn’t resist saying something cryptic, he added, “This world was never changed by our dreams, but by the dreams of humanity. Remember that. It might help someone someday.”

I didn’t try questioning him on that. I didn’t need to. Or want to. I had all I needed, so I waved him off until he disappeared under the air-waves and they stilled again. All in all, it was probably the best send-off I could’ve expected from him.

I was left to bask in that knowledge just a little longer.

I turned and met Xii’s gaze. He cawed.

“Yeah,” I said. “All better now.”

His beak lowered until it was pointing right at the cloudy mass below us. It seemed brighter, somehow. I nodded. The pillar’s gravity took me again.

I fell, but I wasn’t really falling. I was rising to new heights with every fantasy brewing in my head.

I thought about words, words I’d always wanted to say and words I’d finally get to say. Maybe I was overthinking it; there were only three that really mattered, after all. But something had been building up just underneath the surface for the longest time and now, finally, it’d been uncorked. I wasn’t about to try and stop it.

I mouthed those three all-important words to myself and liked the way they shaped my lips, the way they felt sliding off my tongue, and hoped she’d love hearing them more than I’d love saying them.

Though first we had to take care of Elektricitie, and we would, together, and in the afterglow I would let those words out and let fantasy become reality. That would make us both stronger, more than enough for this “dark ocean” that would follow, whenever it decided to surface.

For now, I just had to buy Kat a little time.

A little time, then the words.

**Author's Note:**

> Merry late Christmas! My favorite holiday. 
> 
> Late Christmas.
> 
> Part two (technically part 1 because nonlinear storytelling/I only got this idea halfway through writing Black Cat) of this trilogy is complete. Part 3 releases ??/??/???? so look forward to that.


End file.
